He's wearing work clothes: powder-blue suit pants, a blue monogrammed shirt, white suspenders and a specially made, extra-wide necktie, impaled by a diamond-encrusted tiepin. The clothes are appropriate, because Zindler can't get work off his mind tonight. Days have gone by since he commented on the air about immigration reform, and he's still worked up about it.

Immigrants are marching, he shouts, because the same people who long ago wouldn't let Mexicans eat in downtown restaurants and who fought desegregation "now want to throw them in JAIL for being here illegally. They want to make it a FELONY."

Niki, Zindler's wife, doesn't feel as passionate about immigration as he does. Or, at least, she expresses it differently. She asks questions, mostly, but she asks in a way that suggests she's already formed an opinion, one that differs from Zindler's. He grows more frustrated by the second.

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Zindler has been yelling to make a point for 33 years. That's how long he's been a Channel 13 consumer investigator, the station's first. If he wasn't also the first local consumer reporter in the nation (as has been reported), he quickly became the best known. Only a few months into the job, he did a series of reports that led to the closing of a certain La Grange business establishment called the Chicken Ranch -- "the best little whorehouse in Texas."

He hardly considers that his most important story. ("I didn't care that they had a whorehouse," he rumbles. "We had plenty here in Houston.") But after a long-running Broadway musical and a movie (Dom DeLuise played the Zindler character), the Chicken Ranch story still is the one for which he's best known.

He smiles and says hello to everyone. He doesn't wait to be recognized.

"Hiya, Marvin."

Handshakes.

"Howya doin' Marvin?"

At 84, he still walks with a bounce. It's a cocky little stride, which is what you would expect from a man who looks the way Zindler does. Not that many men do. With his jutting (man-made) jaw, dark glasses, platinum hairpieces and dandified suits (adorned, always, with a color-coordinated sprouting kerchief), Zindler -- who admits to having had 15 cosmetic procedures -- is as singular a figure as Houston has produced in our time.

As he makes his rounds through the city -- his city -- chances are the people who rubberneck to catch a glimpse have on their minds neither the Chicken Ranch nor the story Zindler considers his most important -- his 1985 reports on financial mismanagement by the Hermann Hospital board of trustees. And it's a sure bet they aren't thinking about the Agris-Zindler Children's Foundation, which has helped children all over the world.

No, they're thinking of his weekly reports on restaurant health inspections, with their frequent finding of "SLIIIIME in the ice machine." He shouts it like a battle cry. Or they're thinking of his latest piece -- he's done thousands -- about ordinary people who got a bum deal.

Five days a week, at 6 p.m. and sometimes at 10, Zindler -- impeccably dressed in suits that often are louder than his bray -- plays the starring role in 90-second morality plays in which working-class people face forces against which they are no match. Almost always, the "little guy" wins.

After a visit from Zindler, the formerly recalcitrant company executive issues a refund, a city bureaucrat cuts red tape, or a local doctor -- one of "Marvin's Angels" -- performs gratis surgery that dramatically improves the life of a child.

Those pieces -- "helping kids who never would've gotten help otherwise" -- are the stories of which Lori Reingold, Zindler's producer for the last 23 years, says she's most proud. Zindler concurs. Last February, he was tooling through southwest Houston in his black Chrysler 300C on his way to an assignment when he turned to a passenger and said those stories are the reason he keeps coming to work. He sounded sincere.

He wasn't feeling well that day. He'd gotten a pacemaker a few weeks previously, and it needed regulating. With his friend and plastic surgeon Dr. Joseph Agris, Zindler had begun the day with a mission to help another child. Later, he granted a newspaper interview over lunch (chicken and dumplings at the State Grill). Then he rushed to a Bellaire elementary school to tape a segment.

That was when it got to him. The walk from the parking lot to the school building tired him out. He had to take nitroglycerin and sit for a while.

As always, people were excited to see him. "You're so cute!" one teacher gushed, swatting at his shoulder, almost levitating with glee. "So dapper!"

For the first time all day, Zindler seemed indifferent.

He'd confided over lunch that he felt dizzy on the air the previous day and flubbed a couple of lines. He usually laughs at his mistakes, but this seemed to weigh on him.

"The problem with growing old in television," said the vainest man in America, "is that people watch you grow old."

But that was weeks ago. Tonight, as Niki gets Key lime pie from the kitchen and Zindler cuts his steak into tiny pieces for the dog, he is in good spirits. He got word from his doctor today that it's OK to golf again.

Golf is Zindler's favorite pastime. Before the pacemaker, weakness had forced him to cut back, but he still managed to get in three days a week on the course. He can hardly wait to get back out. In fact, he jokingly tells a dinner guest, Niki's love of the game was what drew him to her when they met.

Zindler's first wife, Gertrude, died in 1997 after 56 years of marriage. He said he'd never marry again. Then he met Niki at a bat mitzvah.

He shrugs and smiles.

"The first thing I asked her was, 'Do you like to golf?' "

Married three years ago, they live in Meyerland, in the modest house Zindler bought with Gertrude 48 years ago. It's full of memories and also nearly a half-century of accumulated belongings. That's what bothers Niki the most -- the clutter, the furniture crowding every room, the knickknacks covering every surface, the boxes of old clippings and books squirreled away in cabinets and closets. She'd clear it all away if she could, not that there's any chance Zindler would let that happen.

"He's very strong-willed," she says when he leaves the room. "There's no doubt about that. But he has his soft side, too."

Then, remembering how agitated he got over the immigration issue, she adds: "And he really cares about people who are underprivileged."

KTRK until recently was Houston's highest-rated news station. (KHOU won the May, February and last November's sweeps.)

Though Zindler complains that the station no longer promotes him the way it used to ("I think they thought I was going to die," he says), he signed a lifetime contract in 1988. He reportedly earns a million dollars a year -- one of his rewards for helping keep Eyewitness News at or near the top in the ratings all those years.

Another reward is the suite Zindler, Reingold and Bob Dows, his cameraman for 25 years, share at KTRK headquarters. It has a glass wall and a sliding door that opens onto a tiny private patio. From his cluttered desk, Zindler faces a mural he commissioned for an outside wall. It evokes two things dear to him -- Sweetie, a white cat he owned for 15 years until it died earlier this year, and the antebellum South (Zindler's grandfather on his mother's side immigrated to Alexandria, La., in 1846 and fought in the Civil War).

KTRK is the station that time forgot. In an industry that celebrates youth, it embraces familiarity and stability. Television covets viewers in the 18-49 age group, and Zindler insists the station does well with them. It's unlikely many of those viewers remember a time when Dave Ward wasn't reading the news. He's been a Channel 13 anchor since 1967. Ed Brandon has done the weather for almost as long -- 34 years. Doug Brown, Brandon's fellow weathercaster, has been with the station 31 years. And reporter Elma Barrera also joined the station in the 1970s.

Zindler came to Channel 13 in 1973 after 10 years with the Harris County's Sheriff's Department. He was famous for his clothes, for getting on television and for such idiosyncrasies as carrying mink-lined handcuffs for female prisoners.

Zindler had risen to the rank of sergeant and worked in several divisions before, working with the district attorney's office, he established the department's consumer fraud division. By all accounts, he was good enough at his job -- and good enough at drawing media attention to his successes -- that business owners he caught in unscrupulous practices wanted him gone.

"He stepped on some pretty large toes," Ward says of Zindler. "Marvin loves to step on toes -- the bigger the better."

When Jack Heard was elected sheriff in 1972, one of the first things he did was fire Zindler. The consumer advocate blames his firing on agitation from politically influential car dealers he caught rolling back speedometers. Whatever the cause, Ward recommended to then-assistant news director Gene Burke that the station hire him.

"I accept the credit . . . or the blame," intones the man who has to keep a straight face during Zindler's nightly braying.

Zindler often says he doesn't consider himself a journalist, but he could claim credit for helping to pioneer broadcast journalism in Houston. In the 1940s, while working days in his father's clothing store, he toiled at night as a DJ and spot news reporter for KATL, a now-defunct radio station. In the 1950s, while working as a volunteer policeman, he also worked for the Houston Press, a long-gone daily newspaper, as a photographer and reporter. He also did spot news reports for KPRC television's fledging news operation until an executive fired him, he says, for being "too ugly."

That's what led to Zindler's first plastic surgery. He's been tinkering ever since. Even after all these years, Ward sounds amazed when he speaks of his colleague.

"He can grow hair," Ward says, his eyes widening. "He's not bald. He just doesn't like his hair."

A Houstonian returning to town after a 30-or-so-year absence would be forgiven if he didn't recognize the man shouting "MAAARVIN ZINDLER" on television. More than Zindler's face has changed. Where today he comes across as cuddly in a curmudgeonly sort of way, in the early years he seemed stern, unrelentingly intense. Zindler attributes it to nervousness.

"I was new," he says as he finishes his pie at the dinner table. "I wasn't a TV reporter. I was scared that I might make a mistake."

He acknowledges, though, that he's mellowed. He loved a good fight in those days; he delighted in bushwhacking scoundrels, catching them unawares.

"They'd tell me 'go to hell,'" he says of his early efforts to hold businesses accountable. "They wouldn't talk to me. Regardless of whether they talked to me or not, I'd tell the story of the other side.

"They say there are two sides to every story, but there are no two sides to a story when you buy a washer and dryer and it goes out in 30 days and you have a warranty and they refuse to take care of it," he says. "There's no two sides to that story."

Today, the man who got not only national notoriety but a public thrashing and two fractured ribs for closing the La Grange brothel says he cares more about outcomes than confrontation and theatrics.

A liberal Republican who decries economic inequities and speaks often of his support for national health insurance ("If you're poor, you die," he says of health care in America), Zindler uses his stories to help people, but he doesn't attempt to encourage systemic or societal change. He's a miniaturist.

The station says Zindler gets 100,000 requests for help a year. Neediness is one factor he uses in deciding which stories to pursue. He also considers his chance of success.

"I will not do a story unless it has a happy ending," he says. Which means that if, after a visit from Zindler, the store still refuses to honor the warranty on that washer and dryer, chances are the story won't make the air.

Spend a day with Zindler and you see people of all ages and walks of life respond as if they're in the presence of the president. At the State Grill, where Zindler is a regular, an apparently new young hostess bows slightly and says she's "honored" to meet him. An elderly man sitting in a hallway at a Medical Center office building shakes Zindler's hand and asks about his health as if they were old friends. The most excited reactions seem to come from African-Americans.

In Zindler's early years on the air, white men at his country club used to chide him for airing so many stories about black people. He estimates that 80 percent of his stories were about African-Americans.

Eventually, Zindler says, his friends realized that what happens to black people also happens to Hispanics and whites.

It was Zindler's father who instilled in him a sense of fairness and concern for the less fortunate. Abe Zindler, who owned a successful Houston clothing store and served four terms as mayor of Bellaire, was a liberal who opposed the Ku Klux Klan and advertised his store in black-owned newspapers at a time when other businesses wouldn't.

Another large influence was Zindler's African-American nanny, Eva Mae Banks. They were very close. She was almost a surrogate parent. Because his father wouldn't allow him to have a car, Banks even drove young Marvin on dates.

"She was with me until I was 18 years old," Zindler recalls. "When I proposed to my first wife, Gertrude, before I could marry her Eva had to OK it."

Through his relationship with her, Zindler -- though white and born to wealth -- experienced racial discrimination firsthand. When they went to the movies, they had to sit in the balcony. There was an ice cream parlor between the Loews and Metropolitan theaters downtown, Zindler recalls. They couldn't eat there because Banks wasn't allowed inside.

When Zindler went with Banks to her Catholic church, he says they had to sit on the back pew.

"The young people today can't understand what it was like for black people when I was growing up," he says. "There's no way you can understand it. You have to be there to understand it."

Zindler considered running for Congress in the 1970s. Local Republican leaders who apparently weren't aware of his liberal social views recruited him. Zindler says they commissioned a survey that said he could win, but Gertrude didn't want to live in Washington.

If he'd entered politics, he would've been following in his father's footsteps.

Abe Zindler died in 1963 deeply disappointed in Marvin. He wanted his five sons to follow him into the retail clothing business, but Marvin hated working for his father, a man known for his angry tirades.

But Abe Zindler and Marvin were at odds long before conflict over the store surfaced. According to White Knight in Blue Shades, the authorized Zindler biography that Agris wrote, Abe Zindler considered his middle son frivolous and irresponsible. When he died, Abe placed Marvin's inheritance in a trust for Marvin's children (he has five), and he left behind a harsh letter.

"I hope that it is not too late for you to learn how to work ...," Abe Zindler wrote. "I hope that you will make good and surprise everybody who thinks of you as a silly playboy with no sense in your head."